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au·then·tic adjective
1. Conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust,
reliance, or belief.
2.
Having a claimed and verifiable origin or authorship; not counterfeit or
copied.
plau·si·ble adjective
1. Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable;
credible.
from MS Bookshelf 99
Author's apology
How authentic is the
historical background of Ama?
What historians tell us of the past is
based on such evidence as has survived. The written evidence of the
slave trade is largely that recorded by Europeans; and African oral
history tells the stories of kings and famous victories, not those of
the daily lives of commoners and slaves.
What I have tried to do is to fill in the
gaps.
Ama is fiction and Ama is a
fictional character. I sketched the circumstances of her life and asked
myself how she would have reacted to them; and how she would have
reacted to the other characters.
The story itself is a figment of my
imagination.
The writer of historical fiction is not
subject to the rules which govern the work of professional
historians. That said, I have done my utmost to make the setting
authentic.
Several incidents in the book are based
on fragmentary stories recorded by contemporary observers and by later
historians. Some of these stories are based on oral history.
One example is the "coup d'etat"
which installed the adolescent Osei Kwame as the fifth King of Asante.
Another is the story of Tomba, from the
time of his capture to the rebellion on board the ship.
My portrayal of Philip Quaque and of Richard Brew,
real historical characters, is based on the writings of academic
historians.
The basic facts of the Atlantic Slave
Trade are reasonably well known, though there is some dispute about the
numbers transported.
I have taken some liberties. The town of
Kafaba, on the north bank of the Volta River, was indeed the site of an
important slave market. I could find little by way of description so I
based my reconstruction of late eighteenth century Kafaba on
descriptions of the slave market at Salaga, dating from the latter part
of the nineteenth century. At the time of Ama's fictional passage, more
than a hundred years earlier, Salaga does not appear in the historical
record.
As to the West African background, I have
done my best. West Africans, I fear, might not find that good
enough. I have lived in Ghana for most of my adult life but I know that
there are complexities in the culture which I have yet to fathom.
The full text of Prof. Joseph Miller's Presidential Address to the
American Historical Association, from which the boxed quote on the left
is taken, is to be found on another page.
Like Rhett Jones (see boxed quote on left), all my knowledge of eighteenth century Brazil, such as it
is, comes from books. Fortunately there are several excellent books on
slavery in Bahia, some written soon after the fictional events I
describe and some with late twentieth century hindsight and skill.
The description of the slaves' worship in
the Bahian forest is entirely speculative. However the fact that
Candomblé, the Brazilian religion based largely on Yoruba beliefs,
continues to flourish to this day, suggests that something like this
must have happened, not once, but many times..
Related to the question of authenticity
is that of plausibility. Here I know I am on shaky ground. It is
impossible for a writer of today to enter into the minds of people who
lived over two hundred years ago. All historical fiction is in that
sense about the present rather than the past, for the writer cannot
avoid passing the mental processes of his characters through a filter of
present concerns. Fortunately perhaps, no critics have survived from
Ama's time to say, “No, it was not like that at all.”
In this web site I have done my best to
provide the honest critic who would fault Ama on the grounds of a
lack of authenticity, with the tools to do so. As to plausibility, that
must emerge from the quality of the writing, or lack of it, concerning
which I have no defence.
In a question Rachel Langford raised on
H-AFRLITCINE concerning the "generic understandings of
selfhood" of individuals in a more or less distant past, I find an
echo of my own concerns about plausibility in creating Ama's character.
I recast Langford's example: "If I had been a young
Konkomba woman, captured and enslaved in 1775 and sent into service in
the Asante royal household (and subsequently that of the Dutch Governor
of Elmina Castle and of a Senhor de Engenho in the Bahian Reconcavo), I
would have come into contact with cultural practices designed to educate
me into thinking about myself and my surroundings in ways deemed
appropriate by my owners . . . What I don't know, and what I have
tried to imagine, is what generic understandings of selfhood that young
woman would have carried within her from her own social context . .
."
Kalamu ya Salaam, writing in FYAH!
November/December 1999 (Issue V) (http://www.fyah.com/fieldnotes5.htm)
(summarized below - see also the boxed quotes on the left) raises
difficult problems concerning the writer's ideological orientation,
problems which also concerned me as I wrote AMA and which also bear on
the questions of authenticity and plausibility.
Rachael Langford on Subjectivity
H-NET List for
African Literature and Cinema [H-AFRLITCINE@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
Subject: African subjectivity Wed
26-01-00 5:33 PM
Could anyone help me with references on
the issue of subjectivity
in African philosophy? I don't
really mean identity here, but the
sense of self and the recognition of
'oneself as another'.
From: "RACHAEL LANGFORD" <LangfordRE@Cardiff.ac.uk>
Sun 30-01-00 7:47 PM
. . . I agree with you that cultural
products both express and construct subjectivity through language. I
appreciate that talking about 'African subjectivity' is falsely to
homogenise a whole variety of thought from different periods and
approaches, in the same way that talking about 'colonial discourse' is
to connive at creating a false and monologic monolith. I realise that
European culture has had contact with African culture from the earliest
of times, and that attempting to find some sort of 'pure' African
thought is to misrecognise the nature of cultural exchange throughout
history. I don't agree with you or with post-structuralism that the
subject is an illusion created in discourse, though I don't discount the
fruitfulness of this idea for many.
So let me make my query more concrete. If
I had been a Wolof-speaking Senegalese six year old in 1935 and had
attended an elementary school run by a mission or by the colonial
administration, I would have come into contact with materials produced
to educate me into thinking about myself and my surroundings in ways
deemed appropriate by (various branches of) colonial discourse. As a
researcher now, I can reconstruct some of these colonial discourses and
trace what some of these 'appropriate' conceptions were. What I
don't know, and what I'm trying to find out, is what generic
understandings of selfhood that six year old would have carried within
him from his own social context. I know these horizons would have varied
according to his family's socio-economic status, religious affiliation,
language group (amongst other co-ordinates) and according to his gender.
Nevertheless, societies do imagine themselves, through narratives and
other social practices, in general terms as a unitary whole and in terms
of the place of discrete individuals within them. But my imaginary six
year old didn't go on to become a novelist or an essayist, and the
teachers in his school didn't record what resistances they came up
against when seeking adherence to their view of the world.
I guess you would contend that I can find
a text about the period by an African writer about this kind of
experience and find there exposed in language a vision of the African
subject. But language is the crux of the issue here, as we can see from
Oyono's Une Vie de boy. If the subject is merely an effect of language
as you contend (I don't really subscribe to that view) and I read a
Francophone African novel, then I get a view of the French-speaking
African subject-effect-of-language who has to a greater or lesser extent
integrated European models of subjectivity into his worldview through
his 'apprentissage de langue'. The other difficulty here is the old
anthropologists' and ethnographers' problem of perspective. As a
European educated in a European tradition of humanities/liberal arts, I
am a reader rooted in a particular
philosophical tradition. However informed and culturally aware I am,
when I analyse a text by an African I am a located reader. You say that
you would 'hope to see a study of the subject based on the cracks and
crevices in the conventional readings/writings of African literature'.
By conventional, do you mean those produced in the Western academy? -
for I would not like to see my understanding of Africans conceptualising
selfhood delimited by what liberal arts-trained Westerners such as
myself identify in African literature as meaning-bearing; I don't say
this to be politically correct, but because I know that there is a whole
lot that I am ignorant of when it comes to how the multiplicity of
different social formations in Africa think themselves and the
individuals in them. I would hope rather to see study of conceptions of
subjectivity in Africa based on an understanding of how different
African communities think self and other through the syntactical
structures of their (non-European) languages; and based on some
familiarity with philosophical thinking, rather than narratives, about
selfhood and subjectivity by Africans; and based on an understanding of
how Africans may have rethought social relations in the face of
colonisation, in order to theorise forms of political or cultural
resistance, for example. (Here again you will think I am homogenising,
since the conceptions of a young Tanzanian don't necessarily hold for an
old Tanzanian; what holds for a rural Anglophone Cameroonian doesn't
necessarily hold for an urban Francophone Cameroonian.)
Kalamu ya Salaam on
DOING BATTLE ON THE CULTURAL FRONT
(Shortened - please check the link for
the full text - MH)
. . . cultural workers occupy a critical
position. Through the
power of our artwork, we artists can
either reveal the truth or maintain myths; can wake up the consciousness
of our audience to the realities of our world or hypnotize people into
believing that beliefs are synonymous with truths. The invaluable role
that entertainment plays in stabilizing the status quo is why artists as
entertainers are paid disproportionate to other workers (such as
teachers and farmers) in modern American society.
Perhaps here we need to clarify the
distinction between artists and
entertainers, that is, assuming there is
a distinction. First of all, all successful art entertains, i.e. engages
the imagination and emotions of its audience. That is the essential
power of any art. So then being an entertainer is part and parcel of
being an artist. An artist must be able to move people.
. . . An essential difference between art
and entertainment is that art reveals the realities of history and the
status quo, and proposes a vision of a significantly altered future,
whereas entertainment reinforces social myths and proposes the futility
of revolution past, present or future.
Judge for yourself, but sooner or later,
those essential characteristics will manifest themselves in all artwork.
You can deal with this or you can deal with that, one way or another,
you either conform to or transform the status quo. Given our current
state, which is a contradictory mixed bag (i.e. we both conform and
transform, but tend to conform more than we transform), the real
question for us as artists is how to mount and sustain cultural warfare
with the avowed goal of winning the hearts and minds of our people away
from conforming to the status quo, win our people over to transforming
the status quo reality.
So that is the revolutionary duty of the
artist: to reveal the truth. This is intrinsically a revolutionary duty
because in a period of cultural domination the revelation of truth in
and of itself is oppositional to the status quo, which works to maintain
hegemony.
. . . an artist who has not come to grips
with the patriarchal and dominating nature of a so-called
"universal" sky god, is an artist unable to break the
psychological grip of Euro-centric thought, and hence, regardless of the
so-called political content of their work, that artist will invariably
end up supporting the status quo, and thus in the long run end up being
an entertainer. Of course, there is much more to discuss in this
context, because this is a very complex topic, but I think you see the
general outlines.
All of this is the context within which I
think our battle for cultural equity and cultural diversity takes place.
I believe what we are struggling to do is defend and develop ourselves
based first on revealing the truth of our day to day lives and our
history, and second on taking responsibility for the shaping of our
future.
Our social truths are tough and complex
in that they include all kinds of contradictory social realities, some
of which are shameful, nearly all of which are painful to reveal. Our
failure to stop the colonizer was often because of a failure to unite
with others who had a common battle to wage even if they were
historically our enemy; a failure to curtail collaboration with the
enemy; and ultimately a failure to overcome our own weaknesses in
thought and action.
The fact is we were enslaved by the
millions and the magnitude of that
slavery could not have taken place
without strategic mistakes and critical sell-outs. Fortunately, as our
ongoing struggle makes clear, we have been delayed but not denied. So
the task of our artist and art institutions is to reveal both the
perfidy of the enemy and the pitifulness of our own weaknesses. You see
when we talk about what needs to be attacked, the internal
contradictions must be very high on our list. Most of the major slave
revolts in the United States were betrayed from within.
So art must look unblinkingly at the past
and the present if it is to offer a clear-eyed vision of the future.
Furthermore, the future of our struggles for equity and diversity, for
empowerment and tolerance, must be grounded in specific realities and
aimed toward a general embracement of the oppressed and exploited
including huge sectors of the so-called "white" world who are
more confused than we are, and certainly more spiritually and
emotionally bankrupt than we have ever been. We may not have much wind
in our sails, but there are literally millions of white Americans
running on empty who live in a world of dread and angst. While I feel no
moral responsibility to save them as whites, I do feel a responsibility
to address them as human beings.
I do not fool myself into thinking that
the majority of people who think of themselves as white will heed my
words, but, at the same time, I am wise enough to understand that I in
no way diminish myself by helping others, even if those others have
historically bought into their alleged superiority over me. For you see,
deep down in their souls they know, just as deep down in my soul I know,
that none of us are superior, we are all humans struggling to survive,
procreate and find a measure of peace and happiness.
The effort to accurately communicate the
complex and contradictory nature of truth is the battle I envision as a
human being, the battle I wage as an artist.
Let your light shine/a luta continua.
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